Mccain Neuters His Press

September 10, 2008

In his dystopian novel The Time Machine, H.G. Wells describes
how the Morlocks, who had originally evolved as a species meant to
provide for the more elite Eloi, have come to subjugate the Eloi: The
spoon-fed Eloi live up on Earth, separated from the subterranean
Morlocks. Since no real tasks are available to them, they spend all day
lounging around, feeble, listless, and ambitionless. In the end, it
turns out that they now no longer serve any purpose but to be farmed
and eaten by their once-servile Morlocks.

I thought of The Time Machine
yesterday while driving home from trying to cover a McCain/Palin rally
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as a member of the press. The McCain press
corps -- once the undisputed kings of McCainworld, with the best seats
on the bus and unlimited bull sessions with the endlessly-solicitous
candidate -- has, in the past couple of months, been turned into
nothing so much as the campaign's Elois. Non-local reporters are
sequestered in their own charter bus, separated from the Straight Talk
Express, and quarantined at events. They are ordered to treat the
candidates with "respect and deference," as though they were campaign
secretaries. The basic function of a journalist is to ask questions --
fish swim, birds fly, reporters inquire -- but the McCain campaign no
longer allows any questions, so there's not much for the traveling
press to do beyond take down the minutes at event after event, publish
what information the campaign deigns to provide, and bear witness to Sarah Palin's slowly-changing hairdo.

While I was
walking to the thronged gym where the McCain/Palin rally was being
held, a man in a black SUV rolled down his window and offered me
tickets. (Yes: Thanks to Sarah Palin, McCain events now have scalpers.)
Looking back, I should have taken them. Identifying myself as a
reporter got me pinned with a series of over-attentive personal
campaign escorts, who funneled me up through back doors into the
press's playpen, a distant balcony area as cut off from the bustling
floor as the women's section at an Orthodox synagogue. Up in our
balcony, writers listlessly check their Gmail and mill around the
catered food table, which itself subtly telegraphs a message as to what
kind of effete prisses the campaign thinks we are: There's caprese
salad with fresh minced basil, tortellini, bottles of San Pellegrino,
and organic green tea bags labeled "Om: to merely say it releases a
vibration of peace."

As the reporters in the balcony see it,
the campaign's refusal to let Palin take questions doesn't necessarily
mean they're worried about her performance. It's just part of the broader McCain anti-press lockdown, in which there hasn't been a real media availability since something
like mid-August. Everyone has adapted handily to the new order. Before
the rally begins, one reporter has his story pulled up on his laptop
screen: It's pre-written with just a couple of underlined blanks to fill in, like a Mad Libs.

Suddenly a howl floats up to the balcony. It must be her
-- but where the hell is she? Finally I spot Palin's pinlike head among
a sea of bodyguards. "Can you hear her?" somebody asks, as she takes to
the microphone. No matter. It's her acceptance speech, the reference to
her husband as the "first dude," the boast that she put Alaska's statejet on eBay.
Looking out the window, I can see that some better-informed rally
attendees are waiting outside to shake the candidates' hands, a
potential opportunity for some spontaneous coverage. But after McCain
and Palin finish, I am regretfully informed that I cannot leave the balcony because somebody has supposedly injured themselves on the exit staircase.

Why
do reporters still bother to travel with McCain? Or, if we have to, why
don't we rise up en masse, flout the quarantine or demand more access,
an active press being fundamental to a democracy? Normally, cutting off
the press poses at least the risk that reporters will turn against you.
But a bit of Stockholm Syndrome has developed within the McCain press
corps, a sense of awe at how deftly and brazenly the McCain campaign
has rendered them useless and plugged its ears to their investigations.
Reporters demolished the claim that the Palin opposed the
Bridge to Nowhere, and yet the McCain campaign insolently still uses
it. Writers dismantled the McCain campaign's untrue assertion that
Barack Obama compared Sarah Palin to a pig yesterday, and yet the
campaign put out an audacious ad featuring the ridiculous allegation,
presumably on the assumption that Real Americans don't care what the
elite press says anyway. The press has
started to buy into that theory, too. "It's great, right?" one reporter
who travels with the campaign told me in the balcony, summing up the
prevailing it's-evil-but-it's-brilliant view of the new McCain press
strategy. "I mean, it's smart. Why should they talk to us? What's in it for them?"